Nathan Wuornos' Winter Vacation
by Roseveare
Summary: On the run dodging Guard assassins, dealing with bullet wounds complications and destructive drinking bouts, working with volunteer crews decking the town for the festive season... Life reconstructed among motels, shelters, gas stations and scrap yards. Christmas 2010 and the holiday plan of Nathan's lifetime.


TITLE: Nathan Wuornos' Winter Vacation  
>AUTHOR: roseveare<br>RATING: PG13  
>LENGTH: 11,300 words<br>SUMMARY: On the run dodging Guard assassins, dealing with bullet wounds complications and destructive drinking bouts, working with volunteer crews decking the town for the festive season... life reconstructed among motels, shelters, gas stations and scrap yards. Christmas 2010 and the holiday plan of Nathan's lifetime.  
>DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.<br>NOTES: I originally left this as a prompt in the comment meme on livejournal, but I decided it was a plotbunny instead and went back to pick it up. Set in the gap between seasons 3-4.

* * *

><p><strong>Nathan Wuornos' Winter Vacation<strong>

Nathan had known they would be angry. He wasn't expecting anger to extend to murder.

In the dying hours of a meteor shower which hadn't destroyed the town but had surely done a great deal of damage, he found himself in Haven's hospital, being treated for his injuries. He was unsure how he'd come to get there. That he'd blanked out enough to be shepherded there by Dwight or somebody else, with all the chaos around him, all those in need of help, all the work to be done... was probably an indication that the hospital was where he needed to be.

He felt nothing, a state that might be permanent now. His injuries made it necessary to adjust the ways he moved, but didn't have to slow him down too much. The glass of juice and sandwich someone pressed into his hand in the white, bright, busy antiseptic-scented corridor were likely of more value to his recovery than the medical attention. As far as Nathan was concerned, with what he'd done and with so much that _needed _doing, he belonged among the able-bodied helping the town.

He turned his back on the hospital and walked out again into the chaos.

Maybe they wouldn't have tried to kill him if he'd still been in there, or maybe it would just have made it easy for them.

Nathan wandered around looking for places where he could help. It felt like the inside of his head matched the outward state of Haven - debris, flames, smoke, a background track of screaming. There was nothing he could do to control the chaos within, so he left it, and focused on outwardly moving. Putting out a fire here, pulling someone from an overturned car there, taking a wounded kid from her exhausted mother's arms to carry back to the hospital. It was easy for him to keep going, when he couldn't feel it.

Maybe the fact he kept moving meant they took longer to find him, and that was part of what kept him alive.

He didn't ask how Jordan was on either hospital re-visit. It wasn't that he didn't care, it simply didn't occur to him that he had any right to care, to ask. He wanted her to be okay, but asking wasn't going to help and the will to engage his mind with it, or do anything but keep moving his body around, were buried, buried, buried - he couldn't _think_. Nothing was _now _except those things physically in front of him.

But later, he was still sure it wasn't Jordan who sent the dogs on him. She was on her back, unacknowledged by the Guard, probably still unconscious at the time. It was Dwight who was responsible, though he never intended the report to be a call for blood.

Nathan was walking through someone's flattened yard to join the effort to put out a fire when he heard the shot. He turned to see men running at him. He counted three, but some instinct told him there were more he hadn't spied. Everyone was a sooty shadow in the smoke-filled night, but his strong impression was, _Guard_. Two of the three had guns trained on him. One of them fired.

The distance was about fifteen feet and despite the fact Nathan wouldn't feel it, despite the fact he wasn't sure he could feel anything just then, in any sense of the word, apparently he still wasn't ready to die: he flinched.

He should be an old hand at being shot by now, but it took several seconds to register that this time wasn't like the others. No need to adjust his balance or catch himself after the _kick _of a bullet's impact, no roll of weakness asserting its effect through his numbness.

"Go!" yelled Dwight's voice, and Nathan realised that one of the figures running in to surround him was much bulkier than the rest. Another shot made the bulky figure stumble.

He heard someone else curse, "Damn it, Dwight," and it seemed remarkably unfair that Dwight was getting shot when it should have been Nathan, who unquestionably deserved it. Nathan hesitated, until he realised they were holding their fire. The Guard knew and understood Troubles, knew Dwight's, and valued Dwight, even if he wasn't one of them any more and there was an obvious difference of opinion on display.

"_Go_," Dwight growled again. "They _will _kill you if you stay here."

Maybe it was cowardice or the last threads of stubbornness in him clinging to life. Impossible to quantify. Nathan turned and ran. He heard curses and the sounds of physical pursuit, but no more gunshots. He was glad, for Dwight's sake.

Running full-tilt with a bullet wound in the leg wasn't advisable whether it hurt or not. The limb's collapse beneath him was almost inevitable. The fall happened fast and out of sight of his pursuers, and it, too, might have saved his life, because Nathan pressed his face into the ground as he heard them coming and hoped his clothes blended in well enough with the undergrowth that they'd miss him entirely.

They ran past. Nathan lay listening to his heart _thud_, making it known that it, too, still valued being alive.

Steps crunched close behind him as he levered up onto his hands. He froze, but stifled the panic. Those footsteps were heavy but had been so adept in getting close to him before letting him hear them that they could only belong to one person.

A set of car keys landed next to Nathan's hand with a jangle that sounded supernaturally loud. "Get out of here," Dwight said tightly. "They'll have men waiting at your house, at the station. Too many of them to fight. I can't stop them coming. You need to leave or they'll kill you."

"I _can't _leave," Nathan rasped, the protest rattling in his throat. Was it the first time he'd spoken since the Barn fell? He couldn't remember. He got himself up as far as one knee. His body wavered there and he wasn't sure how to make it the rest of the way without his leg collapsing. Dwight stood, a grey, oversized ghost in the gathering light, scorched and blackened, skin too pale underneath, and didn't offer a hand to help him up. Dwight would save his life because he didn't agree with killing him, but it sure as hell wasn't out of approval for what he'd done. "There's too much to be done. Every single body is needed right now. I need to _help_."

The Guard should be helping the efforts, too, not expending their resources trying to come after him.

Dwight said, "There's nothing you can do to help now."

Maybe those had been the words that finally broke him.

Nathan curled his hand over the car keys. He fixed his leg under him. Stood up.

"There's a truck parked at the back of the house," Dwight said. "Get as far as you can as fast as you can, then dump it. They'll look for you. Don't contact anyone."

"Duke..." Nathan mumbled. He couldn't abandon... "_Audrey_."

"The cycle is twenty-seven years, if they ever come back at all." The anger in Dwight's voice was barely under control. "What do you think you can _do _with that?"

_Something_, Nathan would have said until that point, stubbornness digging in, determined to find a way. Instead, with Dwight backing away from him and shouts of the hunting Guardsmen returning, louder again through the trees, he ran on legs that could barely carry him, and drove with shaky hands and no real capacity to focus.

He drove to the outskirts of Bangor, left the truck parked legally outside a convenience store, hopped onto the next bus to another sizeable town and lost himself in hopeless anonymity.

As Nathan Wuornos, Haven Chief of Police, with the resources of the Teagues and the Guard and Dwight on hand, he could have done something, or at least have tried. But they took that from him, and as an anonymous drifter on the run, all he could do was fork out some of his limited reserves of cash on the whiskey bottle he soaked in that night, in a cheap motel room.

The whiskey didn't help. Plans, hopes and speculations formed and died in his brain on an endless cycle. Haven didn't want him, except under the ground, so there was nothing he could do.

* * *

><p>He spent three days in an alcoholic haze and sobered up without his credit cards and wallet in a different town again from where he'd started. Losing his wallet wasn't the worst thing, in a way. He'd needed to ditch the cards. This just made it easy to abandon his identity, the false security of it. But he wished he still had the wad of money he'd taken out. With nothing left in the world, he sat on a park bench looking at a bandstand that reminded him of Haven. The occasional snowflake was drifting on the air, but the ground was still visible, barely flecked with white, and it didn't look like turning into a blizzard. Children in winter hats, scarves and gloves were playing by the bandstand. Nathan's hands were pink and swollen. Some small awareness reawoke and made him rub them together and fold them under his arms for warmth.<p>

Nathan watched the children play, and as far as he was concerned, he could have been born on that bench, approximately four hours ago, when he'd woken up there. He had nothing left which bore his name, no responsibilities remaining, no-one to be. What remained of his life had cast him out.

He might have stayed there in his daze all day, but a uniformed officer turned up to move him along. Nathan complied without fuss - he doubly didn't want to give the officer a hard time, fellow feeling and the danger of drawing attention combined. He attempted a wry smile, and moved on.

Asking strangers for the money to buy a cup of coffee in a nearby diner was the hardest thing he'd ever done. The looks of suspicion and disgust - "To spend on more cheap whiskey, more likely," one woman snapped at him, and he couldn't blame her for that, looking and smelling like he did. His thoughts were muddy, sluggish and tortuous with hangover. He'd wanted to forget. He'd wanted not to _think_. But this was intolerable. He needed coffee. The smell, the taste, the alert buzz it gave him.

It seemed he wasn't cut out to be a drunk. The bender had made him feel peevish and drained, and pretty sure he'd spent most of the missing days unhappy and dwelling on all the things he most wanted to drink to forget.

The girl serving in the diner stuck her head out the door and said, "Come on in, it's quiet and we got leftovers from yesterday goin' to waste." She looked about seventeen, a compact four foot ten of out-to-save-the-world, with short dark hair, a grubby apron, and a peace symbol tattooed on the back of one hand. She poured him a coffee at a table in a covert corner, subtly guiding him away from the rest of the clientele.

Nathan sat and sipped and started to feel human again.

"Hey, hey, that's too hot-"

"-Sorry." He put down the cup, and tried to confine his sips to when she wasn't looking. He just wanted the taste and the buzz. He leaned low over the cup to inhale the scent. He inhaled, snuck sips, and tried not to think about Audrey. Or Duke. They were dead, most likely. His fault. Audrey and Duke were dead, and he got coffee.

Maybe cheap whiskey had its better points after all.

The names on the bus stop near the park had suggested he was in Waterville. He'd not have chosen to stick to the highway, but on the other hand, it would be easier to lose himself in the larger towns than the small ones. The Guard would look first in Bangor. Nathan had been to Waterville before, but it had been over a decade ago. Even if you didn't acknowledge what 'Troubled' meant, there was something inside that knew: knew he couldn't leave Haven, else risk becoming a freak in the outside world.

No difference now, no _Haven _left for any of them.

A plate which did not look like leftovers materialised in front of him. Nathan tried to smile at the girl, tried to appreciate her kindness and think less about being a charity case. And he supposed he had better eat. He wasn't sure that he had, during the last three or four days. He didn't feel hunger, but his stomach made an empty growl.

He'd left Haven with almost nothing, and now had even less than that. He needed to find something he could do to make an income. Under the radar, unofficial, and definitely not begging. He could work with his hands. There had to be options.

He let the taste of the food take over his consciousness. That bought him ten minutes without thinking.

He wondered, if alcohol didn't work, if other drugs might.

Nathan left the empties on the table and ducked into the rest room. There was only one, with old, rickety fixings, but clean enough. The first thing he saw, though, was himself in the large mirror over the sink, and he understood why the looks he'd been receiving were so hostile.

He averted his eyes at first, and used the facilities, and eyed the bandages beneath his clothing and came to the conclusion there was no point disturbing anything until he had the means to clean and redress his injuries. When he came back to the mirror, he was drawn to look... and then slowly and mechanically reach out and turn on the faucet. He ran the water first to wash the sink, then filled it up, and rinsed clean his grubby, pale face, wiped clear the mystery smear of dried blood on his upper lip, ran his hands through his hair. There was mud and blood in his hair. In the end he dunked his whole dishevelled head. He used paper towels to pat it dry, then tried his best to clean the rest of himself.

When he'd finished, his clothes still looked grubby and the man staring back at him looked worn, but not quite so much a disgrace. He could hear the traces of remembered voices, Audrey's disappointed and Duke's sarcastic, but both nagging him to treat himself better.

What did they know? He'd killed them. They hadn't trusted him - took his gun, tried to keep him away from the Barn - but he'd found a way to destroy them anyway.

A few heads turned his way as he re-emerged from the rest room. He'd been longer than he intended. The gaze of the girl behind the counter went to him worriedly, and he realised she'd probably thought he was shooting up in there. Then her gaze stuck, her eyes widening. Nathan hadn't thought the improvement so drastic, but some of the other gazes stuck, too. He walked stiffly to the counter.

"Thank you," he said. "I don't have any money right now, but - do you know where I could pick up some work, for a day or two?"

"Tyler Anderson," she said, after a second's beat, wiping her hands on a towel, wringing it around them as her tongue licked her lower lip - nervously? "Has a scrap yard down the road." She pointed. Her smile didn't speak of nerves. "Don't worry about this time. But hey, you can always come back."

Nathan nodded thanks. His body was moving slowly but he was steady. He could cope with this. He could work, pick up the cash to move on, and keep moving, stay under the radar. The Guard had contacts everywhere. Vince Teagues led them. Losing himself was the only chance he had to stay safe. Duke and Audrey's insistent phantoms wouldn't let him contemplate anything else.

Outside the diner, he noticed the sign on the roof said, _Green Eggs & Ham_. The girl with the tattoo was much younger than Jordan, watching him walk away on the other side of the glass, but he found himself thinking about Jordan anyway, wondering if she'd pulled through.

* * *

><p>He stayed too long. Liked the people, didn't mind the work - outside, in the cold, where most didn't want to be, but it was nothing to Nathan - and he found it as good a place to lose himself as any. When he'd been in Waterville nearly two weeks, the Guard tried to kill him.<p>

Nathan was bedding down in the office on an old, saggy, threadbare couch. He'd spent most of his wages on a room the first two nights, before Ty had said to him he might as well stay there while he got more permanent digs arranged; could help the dog guard the place while he did it.

Nathan hadn't bothered to correct Ty about the assumption, but then he hadn't moved on, either. Being there was easy and friendly, more than he deserved. They didn't treat him like Nathan Wuornos, Police Chief, or like anyone had ever treated Nathan Wuornos, but they treated him with good-natured camaraderie, and made it easy to start to forget he'd ever been anyone else.

Until the night he was alerted by the sound of the dog barking, followed by a dull gunshot.

The cut-off whine of animal pain seared through Nathan, awake but still groggy and blinking in the dark. He reached out and knocked things over. The office was _too _dark. There should have been a security light outside, shining in through the window. The Guard must have cut the power.

He stood and heard himself bump something else. He'd probably already been loud enough for anyone outside listening. They already knew he was there, though, if they knew enough to come.

_Thad Hansen_... Should've used some other alias. He was a police officer, he _knew that_. But he hadn't prepared and had stood there after shaking Ty's hand for the first time with nothing on his lips. He'd had to say something before it stretched on enough to be suspicious. He'd surprised himself when that had been what he produced.

Noise came from the door, over to his left. It was locked, but he could clearly hear that someone was trying to force it. They'd manage before too long. Nathan stood very still, adrift in the dark. There was no use crashing around blindly. He made himself _think_.

A little moonlight or ambient city light was starting to pick out the edges of the shapes around him as he waited. He needed his eyes. The office was too cluttered. He tried to edge his way around to the other side of the door, so he'd be behind it when it opened, and heard himself bump more obstacles.

_Damn it_...

Why was he even trying to survive?

"_No more thoughts like that, mister," _scolded Audrey's voice at the back of his brain. "_Move it!"_

Going for the light switch wouldn't be in his favour if they had guns, but the temptation was strong, the helplessness of sensory lack will-sapping. Instead Nathan made himself move gradually, carefully, and when he bumped things, sliding past them so slowly that it only caused a soft brush of sound that wouldn't be audible past all the banging on the other side of the door.

The door hit him when it burst inwards, but since he didn't respond with any noise, they took him for any other inanimate obstacle in the dark. He fell backwards, catching himself against the wall, and they came in straight past him, two men with guns. He'd expect at least one more.

Had to move anyway. The third man waited outside, black shape against a background of grey only a shade lighter. Nathan ploughed into him, curled his hand over a gun and pushed it aside. He brought his knee up, aiming for the groin. The improved visibility outside was an infinite relief. He ran while the other two were still exiting the office, hoping they'd left the gates open, hoping they'd come through the gates and not cut a hole just anywhere in the fence.

Shots rang behind him, but he had no cues that any hit. The dark worked for him, now. In the yard, obstacles helped to block his pursuers' line of fire, scrap metal piles towering like ominous creatures in the gloom, parts gleaming like eyes. Nathan's eyes were sharper than his pursuers', and he knew the territory. His ears were sharper than theirs, too. Listening out their positions, he worked his routes to avoid them, aiming for the gate, edging them around the scrap yard in a game of cat-and-mouse until he could make his break for it.

The gate was locked. He heard the Guard respond to the clank from the mesh and slats as he tried to force it, heard them coming toward the noise. Nathan had the combination, but it was hard, in the dark, for a man with no sense of touch.

He did it, somehow, before the men on his tail caught up enough to get a good shot in. He slammed the gate shut again behind him, and took a step away almost into the man waiting for him outside.

Nathan struck out for the gun muzzle, diving into the bullet. He had a brief, panicked glimpse of a familiar face caught in the streetlight outside the yard. One of Jordan's cronies. Was this revenge? He hadn't shot Jordan. He hadn't wanted Duke to shoot Jordan, though he supposed he'd be dead already if Duke hadn't.

The shot bounced around the broad street. The guy slugged him and Nathan's gaze was knocked askew and filled with sparks, but his foe was ill-prepared for the abbreviated recovery time his Trouble gave him, and Nathan swung back at him unchallenged. He lunged across the body of the falling man, speeding his path to the ground with a ramming shoulder, and sprinted fast as he could into the night.

He couldn't afford to stop until he was sure he'd lost pursuit. By then, he'd lost all track of where he was. In an alley beneath the neon sign of a late-night casino, he frantically checked himself, using the light of an enormous 'A' flashing overhead.

A little blood proved to be from a re-opened wound. He came to the astounded conclusion that he wasn't shot, but couldn't make any sense of it. He continued to search himself for the missing injury. He hadn't perceived the familiar kick to his balance in that frantic moment, and he'd been running fast afterward, but they'd had too many opportunities for him to hope for a total miss.

Nevertheless, it seemed the bullets _had _missed him.

Either way, he finally forced himself to break the loop he'd gotten into. If the Guard found him lingering, they'd kill him as dead as any undiscovered injury. He had to get out.

It was too late for buses, and dangerous on foot. He kept seeing a van circling the streets, in what struck him as suspiciously like a search pattern, and ducked into alleys and behind dumpsters to hide. It _could _have been paranoia...

He broke into an auto-shop on the outskirts of town and stole a motorbike. It was the plainest, cheapest, oldest bike there, but he still hadn't the money to cover it. He left what he could, hoping that if the price was close enough they wouldn't take the effort to flag it as a stolen vehicle. It was, anyway, an overpriced pile of junk.

Enough to get him out of town that night. He chased east into the dawn and headed away from the highway, to the coast.

* * *

><p>From Waterville, Nathan took the lesson that he couldn't linger; couldn't accept someone else's kindness and risk them paying for it as Ty Anderson had.<p>

It was one thing to think it. In reality, he crashed again after the exodus from Waterville, despair taking over, and was only lucky he didn't stay drunk long enough to lose or trade his bike. He came back to his senses with little enough else left.

Nathan was spending a few cents on coffee in a paper cup at a gas station machine mid-town, when a brawny attendant stomping past paused and looked back. His cap said, _Stergent Motors_ on the front. He gave Nathan a once-over and asked, "You sober enough to be riding that bike?"

"No," Nathan responded truthfully, and grimaced acknowledgement of the man's suspicions. He held up the coffee. "Soon."

The guy grunted, but the promise to seek sobriety seemed to satisfy him.

The meeting wasn't the greatest advertisement for his services, so far, but Nathan figured he might as well ask, "You know where I can pick up any cash-in-hand work, today?"

The guy shook his head and gave a bitter laugh. "Around here? The factory closed just last month. Better you move on."

Nathan couldn't move on until his head had chance to clear. Stergent was a tiny, faded town, newly wounded, and the rest of the day proved to reflect the first assessment of the guy in the gas station. Nathan ended up cleaning motel rooms that night for a place to sleep. It wasn't a job for anyone with an enhanced sense of smell, but at least it gave him a place indoors, because the snows had begun. In the small room he'd been allocated for his hard work, he pulled his chair up to the window and watched the white pile up outside well into the night. He slept late, but heavily like usual. Woke up with the night attendant pounding on his door, demanding him out before the day shift arrived.

Nathan sat on the steps outside, sipping another machine-coffee in a Styrofoam cup, watching the paying guests leave. The day attendant was a scrawny teenager, early twenties at a stretch, and Nathan watched curiously while he emptied the rooms and pulled the refuse sacks down to the front. The interesting thing was how the bags seemed to cling to him, contents shifting and clanking to sidle closer as he tried to put them down. A sweet wrapper on the ground began a slow crawl, only to be foiled by the slamming door as the kid went back in for the next sack. When he emerged again, the sacks clung to his legs, and he had to drag and kick at them and curse profusely, hissing a desperate, "No, get _off_, let _go_," like he was talking to an overexcitable mutt humping at his ankles.

_Troubled_, thought Nathan.

"What're you looking at?" the kid demanded.

Nathan shrugged. "Garbage likes you."

"That why you're looking?" The kid slammed the door after himself as he stormed back inside on his next bag run.

Seeing the Troubled in Haven had become a matter of course. Not every affliction was a problem, some were merely an inconvenience. Nathan had grown adept at spotting them. Outside Haven...

The Guard had brought them _in_. Nathan hadn't thought about that overmuch before. He wondered how many people lived with these things, that they didn't even understand.

He got up and went for a walk, leaving his bike in the motel lot. The bike hadn't been the most practical choice for the season. He could have slept in a car. But he couldn't have dragged one of the battered old motors out of the side door of the auto shop to make a quiet, fast escape. Snow was up to his ankles, he had no idea if it had also got inside his boots. He wandered down to the marina, stood on the edge of the sea looking out, and shivered despite himself, reminded of Haven.

The sky was heavy with anticipated snowfall. He didn't want to be on the coast, and couldn't stay in Stergent. He could hide as easily inland, off the highway. It wouldn't be the safest journey by motorbike, now, but he could still make it a few towns over before the snows really closed in.

Every big boat in the harbour was the ghost of the _Cape Rouge_ as he walked past them, trying not to look; trying not to expect a sarcastic shout from Duke. He went back to the motel and dug out his bike from the drift caused by the car next to it.

"Hey, you can't ride that in this weather," the kid yelled at him as he was pulling out. The engine was sluggish and he was slow enough that the kid nearly caught up to him before he was on the road and on his way. Then, the Troubled attendant was just a receding memory.

The main road was clearer than the motel lot or the roads in town, but the bike was difficult to manage. Made more difficult, probably, by having only his sense of balance and the visual cues of how it was handling beneath him. No, it hadn't been the greatest of choices, but they were stuck with each other now.

The snowfall caught Nathan on the road, and then vision was reduced almost to nothing. He was under no illusions that he only _just _made it to the next town, or that his actions had been stupid. Audrey's voice rattled in his head, telling him so, time and time again while he trudged his bike through gathering drifts, to a suitable parking spot. He abandoned it there and took himself off to similarly find a place to wait out the weather.

Not feeling himself freeze to death wouldn't stop it happening.

He sought refuge first in a cafe, to get some warmth back into him before the search. The bonus of the snow and his saturated state was that at least he wasn't grubby. He'd not had chance for a shower that morning before he was cast out of the motel, hadn't thought to ensure he had one the night before. When he had the capacity to think about it, he was distressed by how _un-clearly_ he was thinking. He should be doing better than this. He wanted to survive, didn't he?

Audrey and Duke reiterated to him in no uncertain terms that he did, Duke biting and sarcastic about his lapses but no less full of concern than Audrey, all the same. What did they know, though? He'd killed them.

Time in the cafe drifted. He had money for maybe one, two nights of a warm room if he didn't eat much, then it would be gone. Chances weren't high that the weather would break before it ran out. No-one would be looking to hire under these conditions. The world was set to grind to a halt. The snow grew higher outside and he watched the last of his footprints disappear.

The cafe was almost empty already and he was getting hostile looks from the staff - nothing special, only the sorts of looks that indicated he was in the way of them going home. It would be dark soon. Options were dwindling. If it was between his pride and his life, he couldn't hold off any more. Nathan raised his eyes to the man in an apron meaningfully rattling cups on a tray at the table next to him.

"Excuse me. Do you know where I can find a... shelter?"

* * *

><p>In the end, there were worse places to be stranded. The snow hung on, and if the buses couldn't get through and half the town's deliveries couldn't get through, then he needn't worry about the Guard, either. People dug in and pickings were scarce at the shelter, but adequate. The town was a small, tight-knit community and there were enough volunteer work initiatives running to keep Nathan busy, even if there was no paid work to be had. He spent the first few days largely clearing snow. Halfway through the first week, he found himself putting Christmas lights up between the blizzards, and it only really registered, then, how the season had marched on. He would spend Christmas alone on the run, in some anonymous room.<p>

The other people at the shelter weren't bad company, for the most part. They'd just fallen on hard times, most far more innocently than he had. There were families and couples as well as individual residents. A few of residents had drink or drug habits they had to hide from the staff and volunteers because they were supposed to be clean while they were staying there, but Nathan, having been introduced to a new perspective on those problems, wasn't going to spill anyone else's secrets. When he found Ed Gears going through his pockets in the middle of the night, it was desperation and need he understood, and Nathan only growled at him to leave off and get back to bed.

More Christmas lights, more snow. The weather-locked town begun to sparkle in the previously monochrome gloom. There became something hazy and out-of-time, almost magical in an odd way, about those days. They were so far removed from the reality of the life Nathan had always known. Most of the money he had ended up going on drink, enough at least to keep the edges blurred. He tried to hold some back for gasoline to move on when the weather broke. Time ticked on and this was too long, really, to be in one place, snow or no snow.

Nathan acquired a scarf and gloves and a warm, if battered, lined leather coat from a donation box set up to help the homeless survive the bad weather, along with more beard than he'd ever allowed to grow out before. He hoped to blend in. If he became unrecognisable as himself...

Sleeping in a room full of other men, several of whom had respiratory problems that caused them to snore _very _loudly, was not magical, but he discovered he could cope. As a naturally private person, any kind of communal living had always been a struggle, but perhaps that part of him had gone numb, too.

It turned out a doctor, Dr. Clarke, came to the shelter and did rounds of the homeless once a week. Nathan had missed the first visit by a day, and when she finally saw him, he had no intention of owning up to several bullet wounds. But she saw something, somehow, in his gait and the way he held himself, and cornered him just when he thought she was leaving and he'd escaped her attention.

"A word," she said, tapping his shoulder. He was late faking a reaction to the unexpected touch. She jerked her head at the side room she'd been taking folks into for consultations. Her eyes narrowed further, noticing the omission.

Behind the closed door, she set her hands on her hips and eyed him, deep crinkles forming around her eyes. _Military background? _Nathan wondered, sluggish detective instincts surfacing at something in her manner.

"You don't move right," she judged. "What is it you're hiding under those layers?" After a pause that Nathan endured tight-lipped - he could do silence for _weeks_, if he had to - she added, "No police. After the work you've put in on the decorating this week in all weather, I can give you that much."

Nathan grimaced, not the least because he was getting recognised as a familiar face around town now. He pulled up the back of his jacket and shirt, uncovering the most accessible of the bullet wounds. None of them were very accessible. Jordan _had _shot him in the back.

Dr. Clarke gave a low whistle. "And the leg?"

"Another. Shoulder, too."

"How the holy hell have you been climbing ladders every day for the past week?" she demanded acerbically... professionally disgusted, Nathan guessed. "No, don't even tell me. Cerise reckoned you've some sort of nerve damage going on, too. Asked me to pay special attention." Cerise was the woman who ran the homeless kitchen. Apparently Nathan wasn't as good at pretending as he'd hoped on several fronts. "So, who took a shot at you? _Three _shots. Whoever it was, they didn't do things by halves."

She was briskly disrobing him as she spoke. Nathan's eyes went automatically to find a reflection, to follow her progress. She pulled one arm out of his shirt and threw the hanging end over his other shoulder. Her hands closed around his bad shoulder and his elbow. "Move this," she said. "No, move it backward... Try to rotate the joint." He followed the brisk instructions, noting how her hands moved about, pressing down on his arm and the muscles on that side of his back to feel how the movements affected the whole mechanism.

Dr. Clarke made a satisfied noise. "Okay, that's good. I don't think you've lost much mobility, don't think there's anything still rattling in there. When did this happen?"

"Four weeks?" Nathan hazarded, no longer completely sure. "Maybe five?"

"I'd guess more like six," she grumped. She placed her hands over his back, either side of the pink wound in the lower left quadrant. "Turn from the waist. When did you give up on dressing these?"

He'd carried a roll of tape and a roll of fresh bandage around for a while near the start. But those had gotten lost on his second descent into drink, and he'd decided the wounds were healed over enough to leave. "Two weeks?" That guess was even hazier than the last.

"Well, you're stiff, whether you feel it or not. What you need and you ain't gonna get is a physio program. I can get you a leaflet, and the rest's up to you."

"I'll get by," Nathan said. His stubbornness started to dig in. He was alright. He didn't hurt. He'd got by on his own for this long, hadn't he?

"Tough guy," she snorted, and the reminder of Audrey caused Nathan to close his eyes in pain. Not that Audrey was five-eleven and square shouldered as a linebacker. "Huh. Did that tweak you?"

Easier to answer that with silence.

"Pants down," the doc said, a spark of malice showing she indulged in revenge for his general uncooperativeness, enjoying Nathan's obvious discomfort while he obeyed. She made an instant grunt of judgement. "The leg's the worst. Not too remarkable if I'm given to believe you've kept walking on it all this time, pretending nothing's wrong."

The bullet wound in his thigh - it was pretty much in his ass - was even harder to check in motel and public rest rooms, and Nathan had never had a really clear, good look at it. It wasn't oozing or weeping anything anymore, and it had been easier, in the end, to take the approach of ignore-and-hope-for-the-best.

Dr. Clarke poked for a while. He was starting to get agitated when she said, chewing the words with a funny inflection, "Still lead in there."

Nathan groaned inwardly and leaned heavier against the wall she had him propped against. Her words recalled to him a buried impression of someone in Haven hospital, aeons ago, saying, "_No time to operate on this right now_."

"Okay," he said, approaching the subject cagily. "So now what?"

"I get that damn bullet out of your ass before you tear something up good and proper." There was a flat noise as she planted a slap on some part of him. "Not right now, though. Get dressed."

Nathan silently turned to do so.

Dr. Clarke said, "Now who the hell let you walk away with that untreated?"

Nathan craned his head over his shoulder as he was fastening his pants and held her stare. "Someone who didn't have much choice."

Her breath caught. "They still trying to end you, son?"

He took that as rhetorical and turned his eyes away. When the silence stretched, he felt compelled to offer, "It's the only reason I'm here."

"Lots of reasons people end up on the streets," she muttered. "For most of them, that's not a death vendetta... I need more time and more kit and a more sterile operating room than this damn office. You come up to the surgery tomorrow?" The edge in her voice indicated what she was really asking was if Nathan would disappear on her if she tried to arrange this for another time. "What you really need," she added, "is a professional surgeon, but I can't stop something like that going on record, so I guess we both know that won't happen."

Nathan examined the idea of trusting her and discovered he was alright with that, up to a point. She reminded him of some weird mixture of Dwight and Eleanor. He countered with, "If they find me... and if this goes on a police report, they'll find me... they _will _kill me."

Dr. Clarke searched his face in return. "I don't know what you did to think you deserve that, but I figure you won't do it again. Come to the surgery at half past twelve tomorrow. Place is dead at lunchtimes. We can keep this quiet... Not needing an anaesthetic should help."

* * *

><p>She dug the bullet out the next day, true to her word, and popped into the shelter a few times in the week following to check the wound and change the dressing. She seemed satisfied with progress and eventually told him, "If you managed the others while on the streets, I guess you can manage this. Give it a few more days before you give up on the dressings. Change them daily."<p>

It was easier to do that when he was sleeping in the shelter, which had medical kit and mirrors on-hand, and they were still locked in by the snow, which had only worsened in the time he'd been there. Pickings from donations were getting sparser. With the roads blocked off, the town hadn't enough to think about giving it away.

He'd been there three weeks by the time the weather improved marginally and a few deliveries did get through. The persistent snow thawed enough for trucks and SUVs to start making journeys again, if at something of a crawl. Nathan would have to wait longer to set off on a motorbike, hounded by the threat of the weather turning against him again, and by that time the shelter was all set up for its version of a Christmas dinner the following day. With the choice of spending Christmas with his bunkmates and acquaintances of the past weeks and spending it on the road, Nathan opted to stay the extra day.

Portions were small and dinner was served early, but the real miracle was that Cerise and the others gave up their Christmas morning to do it. She and most of the other volunteers were gone back to their families by early afternoon, and quite a few of the guys got illicitly drunk. Nathan took a walk, enjoying the emptiness of the streets and the twinkle of the Christmas lights on every store. The snow was mostly down to brown slurry and a long way from picturesque. But there were still things in the world left to enjoy. The Christmas tree he'd helped erect in the centre of town at the beginning of his tenure was lonely and bright while the world indoors sat down to Christmas dinner and the afternoon with their families. He lingered staring at the neat spiral of lights up its sides with a vague, warm feeling of pride.

He remembered family Christmases and the voice of his father, hazy with drink and mellower than usual, telling old stories by the fire - usually after Garland turned the TV off in disgust at the world's idea of entertainment. Last year they'd talked and drank together into the night, just the two of them, and it was one of the warmest memories Nathan had of Garland Wuornos in adulthood.

Nathan stood, lost in recall, missing his father more keenly than he had at any time yet. He shook himself, reminded himself of the outside temperature missing from his skin, and turned to go.

A van was parked on the corner, clearly new to the spot because it lacked the accumulation of snow that still decorated many wheels and bumpers. Nathan didn't think anything of walking past it, until darkness descended as something was thrown over his head. His balance skewed as he was shoved - someone had hold of him. Then there was a jolt as he landed on a surface that sounded wooden, with hollow cavities beneath. _Back of the van,_ thought Nathan dazedly. Something pinned his arms; he couldn't move them. He tried to twist his body and couldn't get anywhere with that, either. Something caught and immobilized his feet. A door slammed.

Light flooded in and the darkness and vague smell of dirty potatoes lifted. The Guard hauled him onto his back. Nathan saw ropes around his ankles and knees, and assumed his wrists had a matching set, since he couldn't move them from behind him. They looked tight enough to restrict circulation.

"Hey, Nathan," said the man Nathan had recognised back in Ty Anderson's scrap yard. "What are you up to these days?" He only waited a beat to ensure he had Nathan's attention, then ploughed a fist into the side of his jaw before there was any possibility of an answer. "Jordan sends her love."

Jordan was alive. It was an ironic sort of relief. So, too, was the surge of realising he was truly finished now. He had tried to fight fate - continuing the same path that had got him into this mess, shooting Agent Howard, destroying the Barn, screwing up the cycle. But fighting took effort. Every sober moment of the last weeks had been a strain, and even some of the drunk ones, so far as he could remember them. It was just his own stubbornness which had carried him this far. He could finally... stop.

It wouldn't even hurt.

"Hey," said Jordan's buddy, looking annoyed. "Are you even listening to me?" His fist rattled Nathan's teeth again. The taste of his blood interrupting the lingering flavours of Cerise's Christmas dinner irked Nathan, and he spat the blood on the guy's shirt. "You piece of _shi_-!"

One of his fellows grabbed him. "Take it easy, Mark. You _know _that doesn't work."

Four was too many people for the back of the small van, even if one was trussed virtually immobile. Nathan blinked sluggishly and stared at the face that pressed abruptly close in to his. He knew the man. Of course, he knew a lot of people from Haven, it was his job... _had been _his job.

'Who?' pulled up the name Den Dennison, and recognition was slow because he was out of context. The guy owned a hardware store in Haven, and Nathan hadn't known... "You're in the Guard, Den?" His voice sounded muffled from the blows he'd taken.

"We had a rush on recruitment," snarled Mark.

"Seems like we've got you to thank for that," said the third, hauling on Nathan's shoulder, pulling him up to shake him; probably to knock him down again.

"I didn't mean to-" Nathan tried, hanging his head. Trying to live began with mustering some form of defence. Audrey and Duke still would've wanted him to try.

A hand slapped over his lips, sealing them. "Don't you _dare _try and excuse what you did," Dennison hissed. "You damned us _all_. We'll never be free of the Troubles now."

Nathan had been trying to save Audrey. He still could not understand why everyone didn't want to save Audrey. It had never been a fair choice, and since when did they stand by and commit human sacrifice, _even _for the good of the town? How could they simply stand and _watch_-?

He hadn't understood how bad the consequences would be. He glared up at Dennison along the clenched arm. He supposed the hand over his mouth made no real difference. An apology wasn't what they wanted.

"Jordan says," Dennison said, eying his less calm friend, "his eyes work just fine. We may not be able to hurt him, but if we start cutting bits off, he'll definitely notice."

"We're still gonna kill him, right?" Mark's hands twitched. "It's down to him I daren't be around my family ever again! Troubles were meant to _go_. I could've raised my own son..."

Nathan closed his eyes. "Well, now," Dennison said silkily, "Vince does keep saying we don't _need _him dead. Maybe we just make life real difficult from now on." He finally took his hand away. Nathan blinked his eyes open as his head became free to loll. Dennison had moved his hand to draw a knife, but he only studied it critically and then put it away again. He turned and started rummaging in a large toolkit in the corner of the van.

_No_... Nathan heard his heartbeat picking up. Then Mark seized him by the collar and punched him hard, three times in rapid succession, while Dennison was too distracted to moderate his rage. On the last blow he let go and let the force of the punch send Nathan sideways into a clumsy sprawl. His tied legs gave no leverage to spare him the heavy landing. A buzzing in his ears blocked out all other noise, though he was aware that Dennison was talking hotly, voice raised, gesticulating, and getting replies from Mark that were equally as agitated. Nathan coughed and shifted, rolling onto his back. He didn't have a lot of movement in his legs but he tried to pull his knees up, to swing them over so he could use the van's metal side to crawl back up. Even if dying, or worse, was inevitable...

Not on his knees. Not flat on his back. Not if he could help it.

The third man, forgotten, caught him and pinned him in an awkward embrace, one hand curling up over Nathan's nose and mouth, the other around his ribs and rising in a claw at his throat. Nathan's breathing cut off. The third man was going to kill him anyway, while Mark and Dennison argued.

Nathan jerked his body in the stifling grip. _Make noise_, said some vestigial stubbornness to survive... Drawing Dennison's attention would buy him extra moments of life, however horrible the things that might happen in them. Perhaps buy him chance for some other, real reprieve...

But coherent thought responded, _Stop_. Because this was bad, but at least it would be over. His chances of escaping the full horror of Dennison's intentions were too slim by far.

The Guard man made a gleeful noise of anticipation the moment he felt Nathan go limp in his arms, and drew Dennison's attention anyway.

"Milo, God damn it!"

Nathan's head bounced off the van floor once again, and the Guard, it seemed, were going to fight over him. The whole scene was surreal. He was a living dead man now, either way. The buzz was still loud in his ears, but he could hear his own wheezing breaths, desperate for the air too long denied him. It was never not peculiar to hear his body struggle and not feel it. He let his eyelids start to drift closed. It didn't matter who won. His life was a bone tossed between fighting dogs.

The back doors of the van swung open. A familiar, bleary and dissatisfied voice slurred, "You bastards, get the fuck off him." Nathan would swear he could smell the whiskey from six feet away.

The world jumped as the big drunk took hold and hauled on Nathan's bound feet, as old Ed Gears staggered backwards, and Nathan's body flopped out of the van. Still unable to save himself, but at least the snow piled up between the parked vehicles cushioned his landing. The drift half buried him on impact, his vision filling with white. Ed was shouting like a madman. A lazy patrol car sliding along at the end of the road woke its siren to life in response to the disturbance.

_Luck. Dumb luck_... Nathan could barely comprehend it. Faced with a growling six-four square drunk with poisonous breath and an ecosystem in his hair, and the prospect of police interference, the Guard slammed shut the doors of the van and accelerated away.

Nathan... lived.

* * *

><p>Still being alive was a dazing, confusing experience. Nathan, in a way, had been ready... and now he felt a curious anger toward Ed Gears, reeling in the road over him, balance a constant stagger from one foot to the other on the icy ground. Nathan watched Ed wave to the patrol car and blow a drunken kiss, and he himself must have been buried sufficiently by the snow drift that he went unnoticed, because the car slid straight on past both of them. The police didn't want to deal with Ed, either.<p>

"Fucking bookies," Ed growled, and spat in the space of melted snow where the van had been parked. Nathan opted not to correct him. Ed's thick, drunken fingers on the ropes seemed a pointless exercise. Nathan feared for the Guard coming back before he'd got even the first knot undone. But Ed drew a knife from some hidden pocket, and a few clumsy slashes saw to the ropes on Nathan's wrists. He tried to help with his own knees while Ed cut his ankles loose, but his fingers were uncooperative. Ed shoved them out of the way to finish the job.

"Thanks." Nathan supposed that sentiment was becoming a notable omission. He wavered and tried not to fall as he was dragged to his feet. His legs wanted to curl back into their tied position.

"Here." Ed put the knife away and pulled out a bottle, which he thrust into Nathan's hands and fastened Nathan's doubly-numb fingers around before he let it go. Nathan gulped without thinking about the germ playground of Ed's mouth.

Their footprints in the slush forged a meandering pattern along the road, even though Nathan wasn't drunk. He'd handed the bottle back after the first swallow. But his thoughts weren't tracking properly. He'd almost-

The shock and violence of the encounter still reverberated through him. The threat to his body, his life... Nathan had been in deadly situations before, and he'd faced Reverend Driscoll's insidious hate, but this was deliberation on a different level.

It was deserved. Mark's story, their stories... all those Troubled people whose lives were shattered through Nathan's actions. Even before considering those Troubles that were deadly, that weren't yet activated, that were yet to reap their toll in lives.

_But how could he do anything but try to save Audrey?_

Inside his head, she called him an ass, but Nathan blocked her out. He didn't deserve her lingering to be with him, even in memory. The Barn had collapsed with her in it, a direct result of his actions. Duke he'd sent _into _that, just seconds before...

"Deep breaths," Ed Gears grunted, in the real world, smacking Nathan on the back. Nathan choked and staggered.

"I'm all right." It was hard to get the words out.

They staggered away together and ducked down the relative safety of a back street. Ed collapsed against someone's rear steps with a great crash of distressed wood, and tipped back the bottle above his lips. He offered it to Nathan again, who shook his head.

"They'd have killed me. How did you...?"

Ed shrugged. He sighed and rolled back with a couple of rumbling stomach noises, pretty much done for the day. "Across the road. Whole turkey in the damn trash, barely even burned, still warm. Dribbling with oil. Fucking _Heaven_. Hid from _you_." His teeth bared. He'd save a life at risk to his own but not share a turkey.

Nathan slumped, sliding down the wall until the ground stopped him.

"If you're feeling grateful," Ed said, with a canny glint re-entering his eye. "I can always use another drink."

There was a small Asian-run store on a corner away from the main streets of town that was open, where Nathan bought whiskey for Ed and de-icer for the bike. His life, in the balance, was worth a half bottle of gut-rot.

Ed was a million miles away, and Nathan kept looking over his shoulder for the Guard, convinced his ally would be of negligible use if they found him again. He went back to his bike, and Ed slumped, drank, and watched as Nathan frantically dug the wreck out of the snow and prepped it to run.

The big old man was snoring by the time the bike was purring its asthmatic rattle. It was hard enough to tell the noises of the two apart. Nathan tried to wake him and couldn't. Even slapping his face and yelling his name in his ear only got sluggish responses.

He couldn't leave the guy, not out in the snow, with the afternoon marching on and darkness waiting in ambush. So against his best judgement he had to make one last trip back to the shelter. The Guard were in town and knew that _he _was in town. They'd surely got a good look at who he was hanging out with, and they weren't stupid. Going back at all was insane. He poured Ed in through the front door for someone else to find, then scanned the terrain outside with an intense feeling of paranoia and sprinted for it, slipping and sliding in the snow through the dozen streets back to his bike. Adrenaline had been building throughout the last few hours, normal fear reaction catching up after the stupor that had made him so ready to accept death wore off. That stupor, once gone, scared him more than anything.

He roared out of town and got seventy miles to a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. It was sparsely populated by griping men and a family who'd been stranded trying to head up to their vacation spot in spite of the weather. Nathan had almost no money, little gas, and less hope than he'd started out with back when Audrey and Duke were dead and the best Dwight had to offer him was, "_Run_."

He ordered a beer to give him an excuse to be indoors. He'd already peeled off the grubby, threadbare gloves and hat that made him look like he belonged on the streets, and left them with the bike. His jacket, jeans and T-shirt were grubby and worn, but without the rest they gave a respectable enough appearance to get him through the door. In the rest room, he discovered that the Guard's treatment had re-opened the surgical wound in his leg, a little, at the edge of the incision, and it bled sluggishly, but Nathan had nothing to treat it with, and could only dab the blood clear with water and tissues and leave it. He also shaved off his beginnings of a beard.

Back in the bar, the complaining guys were still complaining, bitching about working Christmas and spouses imagined in the arms of other men and the price of their kids' toys, and who the hell could afford that? Yet there it was on the TV non-stop, kids squawking for _that one, that one, _and you had to make up for daddy not being there Christmas day, but at the same time, really, couldn't you just feel it _building, _so hard you could just snap under it?

Nathan sat hugging his beer trying to figure out how the hell he was going to survive. He'd had no choice but to get out of town fast, but he had no income and no hope of an income, here, in the holidays. He hadn't the resources to make it as far as another town. He approached the staff about selling his bike, thinking he could hitch a lift out sooner or later, and they looked at it out of the window and made faces at him.

He hadn't money for a room. Hell, he hadn't money for another drink, but that was alright, because he didn't deserve to get drunk. Drinking to forget was what people did who still held some thread of a hope they weren't entirely culpable for each and every mistake that had led them to this point.

"I'd never hit my kids, and my wife, she's my honey, I'd-" One of the complaining truckers was shaking his head, voice misted with self-disgust and despair. "But I just get so damned mad with it all. Sometimes I just want to lash out..."

"If you want to hit someone," Nathan spoke up on a whim. "You can hit me." All their stares turned his way. Nathan's brain trundled like clockwork in the abrupt silence. "Twenty dollars a pop. Think of it as therapy."

Nathan double-checked himself, momentarily unsure he'd just said what he'd thought he had. Then he smiled a shaky smile, stood up and put his hands down at his sides, squaring himself. He lifted his jaw. His vision blurred slightly, source inexplicable. His body, for some reason, seemed to be shaking

"...Yeah." He gathered himself, stronger, getting behind the idea upon examining it. "Hard as you want to. No catch."

The guy behind the counter looked alarmed at this turn of events. His mouth worked a moment in indecision. Then he judged, "If you want to do this, go out into the lot."

Some of the truckers were laughing. A few waved it off, turning away, wanting nothing to do with it. But the guy who'd spoken pulled a face, flexed his fist, and nodded slightly guiltily. "You know what? I will take you up on that." He peeled several bills from his wallet and showed Nathan before stuffing the notes in his pocket.

Three of the group followed Nathan outside. He made enough in half an hour for board that night and to keep him the two days and nights after.

* * *

><p>Dave Teagues phoned Nathan one day in late January, at a motel and drive-in cinema complex on the outskirts of Bangor. The box office attendant, Julie, came out and said, "You Wuornos?" as he was lingering by his bike, about to move on. He hadn't been through a town centre in weeks, but he had been at the complex three days. There wasn't much to look forward to in this new life but the drive-in was having a Coen Brothers season and he'd discovered he did want to see <em>Fargo <em>again. He still couldn't imagine how Dave had found him.

"There's a guy on the phone," Julie said. "Just called up the phone, says to me 'There's a skinny, gruff fellow who don't talk much hanging around out there, name of Nathan Wuornos, can you get him for me?' Are you him?"

Nathan couldn't remember offering his name to anyone here except, just once, 'Nate'. But curiosity tugged at him and even though he smelled a potential trap, he went in to take the call.

"_Dave_?" he barked down the line as the incongruously burbling, cheery voice greeted him all the way from Haven.

"-up for money, Nathan, _really_? Like that's keeping your Trouble under the radar?"

"Shut _up_, Dave. How did you find me?" Panic stirred. If Dave had found him, then others could. The Guard-

"Relax. I'm ringing to tell you about those guys who were hunting you. Vince finally got them back to town, and they are good and cowed. Of course, half of the Guard still wants you dead, but things are calmer now. I wanted to talk about starting to grease the wheels here so we can get you home."

"No." Stumbling through the trees with assassins shooting at him. Flaming houses and death falling from the skies. Death or mutilation in the back of an anonymous van. Nathan couldn't ever imagine going back.

"Nathan, you don't understand. Troubles are crazy here. Dwight's good, but he's more the clean-up-after type. Now that we've lost Claire as well... and..." Dave stopped himself from mentioning _Audrey_. Or for that matter, hell, even Duke and the Crocker curse. Nathan really had taken out all their options in one swoop. "We need someone like you, someone who understands them, who can talk to them, more than ever."

"Dave, I can't come back." The insanity of the suggestion almost made him laugh. What did they think he was? Haven tried to kill him. The Guard were never going to stop. Audrey was dead. Duke was dead. How did they possibly think he could go back to fighting Troubles like _this_?

"Think about this," Dave entreated. "If I can - If Vince can talk them down... Just consider it. If they know you're willing to come back and work on this, that you want to make it right..."

"I can never make it right, Dave." Nathan slammed down the phone. He was shaking. He lifted his head and tried to rearrange his expression, but meeting the wide-eyed stare of pretty Julie, on the right side of her desk now, he had no idea what he looked like.

He staggered out of the office and got on his bike, and he sped out of that place just as fast as he could push the clapped-out old machine to carry him, without another word to anyone.

Dave didn't find and call him at the next stop, when he rode like a crazy man and covered miles, but Dave did find him by the time he moved onto the next, and again the one after that, and after that... give or take a few gaps... until it was driving Nathan to distraction. He didn't know how Dave was doing it, no matter what precautions he took. Maybe he was using someone's Trouble to help him out.

Eventually, with the first stirrings of spring in the air, Dave gave up. Nathan stopped getting the calls. After a while, when he realised they weren't coming any more, he started to miss them.

Maybe it was courting head trauma every other day that did it, but by the time March was drifting into April, he begun to be aware of a yearning to make a difference again. He'd killed Audrey, killed Duke, stuck Haven with the Troubles forever, then just walked out and abandoned the whole town. There was still one of those crimes he could do something about.

But Dave didn't call again. The itch in him went unacknowledged. The Guard would kill him for sure if he rolled back in unannounced. And yet...

_Hope _was something nobody really needed, that treacherous, false feeling of possibilities. He had no possibilities. This was what he'd become and he wasn't... wasn't biding his time for things to get better. Because Audrey was dead, Duke was dead, and the Troubles were endless. There was no _better_.

He told himself that every day.

Until, one day in May, Duke Crocker walked back into his unfeeling embrace.

END


End file.
